Monday, July 09, 2007

Andreas Zachariah, a student graduating with an MA in Industrial Design Engineering and the first accepted to study at the Royal College of Art (RCA) with an MBA, is one of this year’s winners of BSI’s Sustainability Design Awards 2007 for his “Carbon Hero™” personal carbon calculator.

Carbon Hero™ calculates the exact carbon footprint of the user’s transport habits by identifying different forms of transport taken as a user travels through ‘space’, by virtue of their relative location, velocity and the pattern of their activity. All of this comes in a unit the size of a key ring.

Once gathered, the data is downloaded to software on a PC or mobile phone which displays the amount of carbon used and the amount of credits needed to be purchased in order to offset the amount used.

That is a slick idea. I like the idea of having a gadget that automatically determines how much CO2 you are emitting without requiring any input by the user. Seems like if you have a cellphone with GPS you could get this to work with just software and not even need the additional device.

Determining mode of transportation and emissions based on how quickly you are traveling is a very clever idea. Distinguishing trains, airplanes and cars seems fairly straightforward, but I wonder if it can determine if you are riding on a bus or taking a car? Possibly by the number of stops that the vehicle makes. But then what if you are stuck in stop and go traffic or hit traffic lights? And if you are carpooling I don't see how it could figure that out at all.